1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to pallet making machinery, and more particularly to a continuous method and apparatus for making cardboard runners and stringers and assembling them into a cardboard pallet.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Prior to the advent of the present invention, the stringers and runners used in cardboard pallets were made in a series of discontinuous operations. While the blanks used to make the runners and stringers were scored in a similar manner, the folding operations involved numerous stops and starts as the stringers and runners were folded along each fold line by machines using what is commonly referred to as a "monkey motion". This process took substantially longer than the process disclosed in the present invention, and thus was time consuming and uneconomical, and did not lead to widespread use of cardboard pallets in industry because of their expense. The present invention, by using a continuous process, is able to make cardboard pallets much more cheaply, solve long standing problems in the art, and promote the use and adoption of such cardboard pallets.